Books: Jovial, Middle-Aging Man

Novelist John Wain, 33, is identified by his British critics and his
U.S. publisher as one of the Angry Young Men, but his second novel to
cross the Atlantic does not look back in anger. It is a lively, funny
story, essentially an American-style narrative about how men make good
in a bad way in the big city and learn that success in the end is
nothing but dust and ashes.

The publishers describe The Contenders as "a novel of character," and
there they are right. The narrator...